


Turn Around, Bright Eyes

by PanBoleyn



Series: Witch Oil and Marsh Fire [3]
Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Daemons, Canonical Character Death, Discussion of Canonical Suicide, Fix-It, Gen, M/M, The Characters Are Ours Now, minor crossover, underworld fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-23
Updated: 2019-08-23
Packaged: 2020-09-24 22:22:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,381
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20366050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PanBoleyn/pseuds/PanBoleyn
Summary: “We’re dead, Ariadne. Maybe I didn’t - maybe we didn’t - but whatever we wanted, it’s over.”“But what if we just don’t get on the train? What if we try?”Quentin and his daemon walk through an arch, but never catch a train. They run instead, trying to find their way home. Along the way, they stumble across new faces, a job to keep them busy until they leave, and eventually a goddess. But in the end, whether they live again or not comes down to a choice - and how brave they can manage to be.Companion fic to Now There's Only Love in the Dark





	Turn Around, Bright Eyes

**Author's Note:**

> As always, thanks to my RAO enablers!
> 
> Macaria, in Greek mythology, was the daughter of Hades, the goddess of blessed death. Since she has no confirmed mother, I chose to make her the daughter of Persephone as well.

** _(i) and will I come back, who can tell_ **

“It just looks like a train,” Ariadne says. 

“Well, Penny did give me a MetroCard,” Quentin says, swallowing hard. It had been easy in those first moments, after Penny had assured him that his friends would be fine, that they would thrive because he died for them. When Penny had handed him the card and let Quentin give him a hug, when he’d told him all the bad falls away, just go through that arch. It had been easy for Quentin to lift his chin and walk through, easy in spite of the hesitation he could feel from Ariadne. Easy in spite of the flicker out of the corner of his eye, a metal door half-turned to wood that had seemed  _ almost  _ familiar. 

But Quentin hadn’t let himself look closely enough to see why. He’d turned away and gone through the arch, into a train station. He can see other people coming through other arches, carved into the wall on this side. Some of them look calm or relieved, some even joyful. Others look sad or angry, and even through the numbness that’s overtaking Quentin again, he feels sick when he sees that some of them are children. 

Out of the corner of his eye again - a tall man in a dark suit with curling dark hair. 

_ Eliot, with a cane he carried a lifetime ago, where’d he find it, pulling a peach from his pocket. Cythera curled in a tight ball at his side. _

Quentin, about to join one of the lines onto the train, stops, faltering, because Ariadne hasn’t moved. One look at his daemon sitting stubbornly by the place where they’d come through the wall and he sighs. “It’s too late to argue about this,” he says quietly, going back over to her and trying to pick her up. But she swipes at his hands, which hurts them both so when she does it she always means it. Although he can’t actually feel it here, it’s still a sign that she means business. “We’re dead, Ariadne. Maybe I didn’t - maybe we didn’t - but whatever we wanted, it’s over.” 

Penny had tried to convince Quentin that because he hadn’t wanted to leave his friends, he hadn’t killed himself. But the truth is, he’d known what he did from the moment he’d asked the question. The other truth is, he hadn’t meant to. Hadn’t planned it. He’d simply… partway across the room he’d forgotten there was any reason to run, and he’d been so tired, he just wanted to rest. 

The last thing he remembers is the horror on Alice’s face. Alice, who he’d just made up with. To try and be friends, and find something of what they’d been before tumbling into a relationship that - in hindsight - maybe had been far too quick for both of them. He thinks of Julia holding the card, Margo tossing the crown he’d never lived up to into the flames. Thinks of all of them, even Kady and 23, singing a song that Quentin had always thought was a bit silly but they’d made it melancholy, a farewell.

The last voice he’d heard, walking into the dark with Penny, had been Eliot’s. 

He got to see Eliot again, but he didn’t get to speak to him, he didn’t get to be with him for even a moment, one last time.

“Why didn’t Margo see us?” Ariadne asks. “Her fairy eye sees ghosts, she should have seen us.” 

“Does it matter? They said goodbye to us, they’re not - no one is going to come for us, they move on, move forward. They’re better off without us, Ariadne, we should just get on that train and go,” Quentin says. But it hurts, saying that. It hurts to know they won’t even try. He remembers struggling to save Alice, remembers trying to help Julia. Burning up all he had left in him to get Eliot back, and it aches to know he’s not worth any similar effort. “Maybe they know that too,” he whispers.

“Or maybe they just think it’s impossible. Or maybe Penny was lying to us,” Ariadne hisses. “He does work for the Library. We got Alice’s shade out of the Underworld Meadows, why can’t someone come get us?” 

“Because Alice wasn’t all the way dead. We were disintegrated and no one is coming for us or they wouldn’t have had a funeral!”

“We had one for Penny and Alice still tried to get him back! Anyway, who says we can’t get ourselves out if we want it badly enough? Do you want to be done, Quentin? At twenty-six? When we’ve only just started to fix things with Alice and Perdix, when we didn’t even get to see Eliot and Cythera properly again, when our friends are going to have more to face and we could be there? Don’t you like any of them anymore?” 

“I like them. I love them. And you and I are dead. That’s that.”

“But what if we just don’t get on the train? What if we try?” Ariadne insists. “Maybe we can at least still be here when they get here, and we can all go on together.”

That isn’t such a terrible thought, actually. Worst case scenario, they’re stuck in a train station, or they end up back in the afterlife bowling alley, until their friends get here. And in the best case scenario… He doesn’t dare think about that right now, doesn’t dare quite look at the fact that yes he wants to go back to his friends but more than anyone he wants to go back to Eliot. He can’t quite look at it now because the best-case scenario of what Eliot might want, might have meant when he quoted Quentin’s own words in the park also means that right now - 

Last time, he had to bury Eliot, and this time, he’s made Eliot be the one to bury him. 

“OK,” Quentin tells Ariadne, and instead of getting in line, they slip into the crowds of people waiting to board the train, trying to blend in with the group. 

  
  


** _(ii) head spinning round, no time to sit down_ **

“This was your idea!”

“Well, I didn’t know we’d be dodging Furies!”

They’re crouched together in what looks like a janitor’s closet, used mops and faint smell of cleaning chemicals included. Quentin isn’t sure what it really is, because he - assumes that there’s no actual need for cleaning in the train station to the afterlife, but what does he really know? Not much, he reflects, going quiet and holding his daemon close, shaking as they hear wings beating outside the door. They don’t need to breathe, which is a good thing, because Quentin’s pretty sure the Furies would hear him. 

He doesn’t know how long it took before they found him, ducking between lines, pretending to have just come through one of the arches. There’s no way to gauge time, here. The clocks are useless, the hands just spin and spin like compass needles that haven’t found north yet. There are no windows, and the fluorescent light never changes. The people waiting in line change, of course, but he’s noticed he can’t focus on any single person for more than a moment before his vision starts to blur, so that’s not really much help in keeping track of time. The trains run at steady intervals that never change, as far as he can tell.

He never needs to eat, never needs to sleep or use the bathroom, his feet never hurt. There’s no way to know how long it’s been. 

It feels like it’s been years. 

_ No one is going to come for us, _ he’d told Ariadne, and she had insisted they should try anyway. And now, well, Quentin has the distinct feeling that it wouldn’t matter if he just got back into line, he’s already on the Underworld shit list. Which is, you know, just fucking great because at least when on shit lists in the living world, dying was a Get Out of Jail Free card. Now, he has no idea where he’s going to end up. 

Julia told him once, that when she tried to resurrect that hedge boss lady, Marina, that she came back for like a minute and she came back screaming. Quentin would very much like to not go to Hell, thanks. He still has his MetroCard in his pocket, sometimes he thinks he should just give getting on the train a shot, hope he can get to a peaceful part of the afterlife before the Furies figure it out. Even Ariadne won’t argue the point anymore, he thinks, feeling her tremble as they listen to the Furies hiss outside the door. 

But what would be the point, then? What would be the point of having tried to run at all? 

Quentin holds his daemon close and leans his head back against a cold metal wall, and he doesn’t breathe, his heart doesn’t beat. He’s already dead, but nothing got simpler, nothing got easier. And no one is coming for him but the Furies. 

Maybe he should have just gotten on the fucking train. But he didn’t want to, is the thing. If Ariadne didn’t, then he didn’t, because they are one person. Ariadne, always the one stopping them from dying, until even she couldn’t. Because she had faltered too, in the Mirror Realm, thinking of Cythera, blank-eyed and walking into walls, catatonic except still able to move. Of her form going soft-edged, gold dust in her fur. 

Eliot, bleeding out on the forest floor. 

Eliot, hunched in on himself at the bonfire, a peach pressed against his lips and a look on his face like he isn’t really present at all anymore, Cythera curled up and trembling next to him. Margo blinking back tears as Talaus curled round Cythera and tried to comfort her.

Julia, with tears in her eyes, Asterion shrieking what sounded like sheer pain even over that damned song, and Perdix shrieking with him, becoming a hawk of pure gold soaring with the falcon as Alice threw the mug Quentin had mended into the fire. 

Kady and 23 looking uncertainly at each other after tossing one of Quentin’s Fillory books and a little figurine that looked like Ariadne to the flames, for once not at odds because they both felt somewhat like outsiders, the maned wolf lying across his human’s lap and the crowned eagle fidgeting on her human’s shoulder. 

Quentin remembers that now, as if he - the thing is it’s like he’s only just remembering it. He remembers Penny showing him the funeral, remembers thinking it was an odd choice of song but hey, maybe they wanted to send him off without too much sadness. He remembers seeing them all alive and well, seeing Eliot himself again, remembers Penny drawing him away. Remembers being assured they’d all be fine. Remembers believing it completely, of course they’re better off because he sacrificed himself, of course he could do more for them in death than life. He’s always suspected that might be so.

But why didn’t he remember Eliot’s thousand-yard stare sooner, or the way Asterion and Perdix had flown up into the night, or Margo almost in tears? Or Eliot and Alice holding hands?

And there’s something else too. When Penny, being far too nice, had told him that the reason for that was because death stripped away all the baggage, left you just yourself… That’s what Quentin always daydreamed about, isn’t it, when he’d been suicidal before? The idea of peace, of not having the depression anymore, of escaping. How likely is it, when magic is as nightmarish as it ever is beautiful, when Fillory turned out to be as fucked up as Earth is in terrible unfamiliar ways, that  _ death  _ of all things should line up so exactly with Quentin Coldwater’s silly illusions?

Something isn’t right, and Quentin knows it. He can feel it, and as the Furies move away, he whispers it to his daemon. Ariadne looks at him, and he can see her because - they’re dead. Darkness means nothing. All he has to do is think and he sees her clear as day. In greyscale because it’s kind of like magical night vision, but still. He sees her. “They aren’t coming,” he whispers. “But I think someone… something’s wrong. What he showed me. Something’s wrong.” 

“Maybe they are coming.” 

“Ari, it’s been so long. If they were going to come they would have.” 

“Maybe they would, maybe they don’t know we’re still here, or don’t know we can be brought back. We did disintegrate,” Ariadne points out. “But what I want to know is why our memories seem so off, why Penny was so strange. And what that means for -” 

“What Penny told us in his office,” Quentin finishes, closing his eyes. “There’s not much we can do about it from here.” But it tugs at him, the idea of Julia and Asterion left alone - except for 23, who Quentin does  _ not  _ trust after he took Jules’ choice like that - to struggle with finding magic yet again, Alice and Perdix at the Library when God knows trying to make that place better will be a nightmare. The idea of Eliot and Cythera, Margo and Talaus, in Fillory, with “a new quest”, as Penny had vaguely put it. 

He and Ariadne should  _ be there _ , be there to help. “That could be why they - maybe there’s no time for them to find us, if there’s so many new crises,” he says quietly. But he isn’t thinking about trying his luck on the train now. They aren’t going to come for him, maybe can’t, maybe they think it’s impossible. 

Maybe it is. Penny tried to come back, it didn’t work - although from what Alice and Julia said, it very well might have if Alice’s body hadn’t rejected Julia’s goddess magic when they tried to save Penny. But the last bit of god magic Alice had brought back her, Eliot, and Margo once. Alice is alive, even though her original body is still buried in a Whitespire garden. 

Maybe going back is impossible. Maybe it’s not. Quentin doesn’t know, really. Part of him isn’t sure he should try, isn’t sure if maybe he should just… let them go, try and move on, wait for them on the other side. See his dad, and Arielle and Teddy, and wait. Rest in peace, finally. But the larger part of him thinks that he can’t just give up. He didn’t let the end be the end for Alice, he didn’t let Julia and 23 take out the Monster when that would kill Eliot, did he? 

“It was a lot easier to do it for them,” he tells Ariadne, and  _ easier  _ is relative, of course. It’s just that making that kind of effort for himself is… daunting, when for them it had simply felt necessary. 

“That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to save ourselves just as hard,” Ariadne says. “Do you really want to be dead, Quentin? Did you want to die, or just rest?” 

“Does it matter?” 

“Yeah, it does. Because if what we really wanted was just rest, that’s - we made a mistake. We didn’t need to die for that. We shouldn’t have died to get that. We could have just gone home and slept for a week, because everyone was safe.” 

Quentin closes his eyes again, and tries to think. Focusing on his last moments, on everything after saying _ “Just a minor mending,” _ is hard, but he thinks, he thinks that really, all he wanted was to rest. He didn’t  _ care  _ in that moment if rest meant dying, but that’s not - it comes to the same end, but he hadn’t  _ wanted  _ it to mean dying either. “OK,” he says finally. “We’ll keep pushing it.” 

They edge out of the closet and Quentin is just standing up when a dark shape swoops down. “Fuck! Run!” He and Ariadne scramble down the hallway, a Fury shrieking behind them, until they find another door. Quentin yanks it open, dives through after his daemon, and kicks it shut, hearing the Fury thud into it. 

“Fucking hell,” he breathes, then frowns as he takes in his surroundings. This… looks like someone’s house.

“Huh. A visitor. Can’t say I saw that coming,” says a voice, and Quentin looks to see a man somewhere in his thirties, dark haired and blue eyed, offering him a hand up. After a moment, Quentin takes it. “Cole Turner,” he says. 

“Quentin Coldwater,” Quentin says, brushing himself off. “Uh… where am I?” 

“The Halliwell Manor in San Francisco. Or a limbo set there anyway. My ex-wife and her sisters live in the Manor, and I’m stuck in limbo here as a punishment. Welcome,” Cole Turner says, and the sarcasm in his voice is damn near enough to choke on.

  
  


** _(iii) and all I am is all I could not mention_ **

“So you… sit here and watch your ex-wife and her sisters. That’s kind of creepy, isn’t it?” Quentin asks, carefully. At his side, Ariadne is tense, but the coyote at Cole Turner’s side scratches at an ear unperturbed. 

“Oh, absolutely, but I can’t leave,” the other ghost says blandly, leaning against the wall. “I’ve tried. I leave the confines of the house and yard, I’m zapped right back in again. One of the conditions of my punishment, I suppose.” 

“Not that it stopped you from playing up the creepy factor when Piper was in here, staring at Phoebe and quoting Shakespeare,” the coyote notes. 

“Can you blame me for taking the chance to annoy her?”

Quentin and Ariadne watch the byplay between the other human-daemon ghost pair, and try to relax. It’s easier to tell time here, in a limbo that looks out on a real world - they don’t think it’s their world, but it’s a world, a house in some Earth’s San Francisco, apparently. A day of this in the company of Cole Turner, former half-demon and ex-husband of second sister Phoebe, and his coyote daemon Bellona.

It’s weird, probably the weirdest thing to happen since he died, but there are no Furies here, so for now he’ll take it.

“So… you were able to contact Piper once? How did you do that?” Quentin asks, trying for casual. From the look he gets, he failed completely. 

“Nice try, kid - Quentin, right? The Halliwells can summon ghosts, that’s true, but not me, and almost certainly not you since you’re on the same plane as me. Piper was caught between life and death under very specific circumstances, and that’s how she ended up here.” Cole grins, and it’s not a very pleasant smile. Then again, from a former half-demon, presumably it wouldn’t be. “I did help her get back, because - I did cause them a great deal of trouble at the end, when I was spiraling and out of my mind with power and heartbreak. Tried to make them kill me. Eventually it worked.” 

Well, that’s alarming. “Is this a place for people who commit suicide?” 

“Hmm? Oh, no. I didn’t - when it actually worked, I was not trying to make them kill me,” Cole says, shaking his head. “No, I’m here because even in death no one can decide what I am. Too demonic for a good afterlife, too human for the truly bad ones. And so I’m here. Why, did you -” And for the first time, something like kindness crosses Cole’s face as he considers Quentin. “You… can’t be older than twenty-six.” 

_ Give or take fifty years in my head that never happened, _ Quentin thinks but doesn’t say. “Right on the money, actually. I - would have been twenty-seven in a few months.” He sits on the bottom step and Ariadne lays her head in his lap so that he can pet her. Quentin’s not sure how he can sit, but he’s trying not to think too hard about it in case not thinking is the trick. “Did a kind of, um, kamikaze thing to stop this guy, I don’t know if it was… It all happened really fast.” 

_ “Did I do something brave to save my friends or did I finally find a way to kill myself?”  _

Quentin knows he killed himself. He also knows that it was… sort of both. And that he didn’t really mean to do anything in particular in that moment, he’d simply reacted on instinct. That’s why he hasn’t just moved on, after all. The thing is, he doesn’t know how to explain that, or if he even should explain it. He doesn’t know this man with strangely piercing blue eyes, doesn’t know that he wants to. 

But there isn’t anyone else here. 

Cole talks about the Halliwells, as the hours pass. Quentin gets the sense that Cole has been a lot lonelier than he himself has - which makes sense, because Quentin has been kind of busy running. Having a daemon means one is never alone, but sometimes, new faces help. And so Bellona and Ariadne sit together, while Cole settles on a step a few above where Quentin is. Quentin’s turned to look at him, leaning against the banister. Again, don’t think about how that’s possible, don’t think about it. 

It can be difficult not to think about it when one of the kids - Wyatt and Chris - go tearing up the stairs and walk through Quentin and Cole, but he just tells himself the house is still solid. It works, more or less. After a story of Piper becoming a Fury - different breed than the Underworld variety - and another of Phoebe becoming a mermaid, Quentin frowns. “But magic comes from pain, it doesn’t turn you into things.” 

“First off, we’re dealing with different kinds of magic, I suspect. Secondly, though, that kind of reasoning sounds very much like what I was raised with in demonic training. The more it hurt, the more you learned. Not unlike how most humans used to think children only learned if they were beaten, but much more brutal. I’ve heard of many kinds of magic, traveled in different realms. I don’t think they gave you the full truth.” 

Quentin starts to object. Eliot had said it, Margo had said it, Penny 40 had prompted him to say it when they were in his office - but then, as far as Penny 40’s concerned, Quentin’s memory of his own funeral is different than what he’d thought he was seeing at the time, so he’s not entirely sure things were all aboveboard, there. But Eliot, Margo, they’d both said… but then they’d have learned that from Brakebills. Fogg, taking him off his meds, Quentin had never really thought about why, but… 

And what does it even fucking matter, right now, when he can’t do anything about it anyway?

So he asks a different question instead. “You said Phoebe became a mermaid when you came back from the dead? You’re on your second afterlife?” Because if he can do whatever Cole did, then maybe this is the breakthrough he needs.

“Yeah,” Cole says grimly. “So here’s the story. When I met Phoebe, I was a demonic bounty hunter who seduced her in order to get close to her and her sisters. I was going to kill them. But, being half-human, playing human for the first extended length of time since I was an adolescent… Unlike pure demons, I have a soul. In many ways being half-human had been useful for me; I came into my powers later but once I had them I was as strong as any demon, and less prone to careless thinking out of fury. So I betrayed everything I knew for Phoebe, and - well. Things went back and forth, for a time, to summarize. Eventually, my powers were stripped from me. I was human. I was… not very good at being human.”

Cole continues the story, beginning with fumbles like his choice to carry a gun - Quentin thinks of Kady still carrying Sam’s gun and figures that wasn’t an entirely horrible idea given that the Manor apparently became a war zone on a regular basis - and his attempt at working for Legal Aid. Then he explains about the Source of All Evil, king of demons or something like that, his aim of killing the Charmed Ones. “The Seer told me that if I took in the Hollow, I would save them. But what also happened was that it allowed the Source to possess me.” 

Quentin thinks of Eliot shooting the Monster, of the Monster in Eliot’s body approaching Brian at a coffee shop, and feels sick. “What happened?” 

Cole’s laugh is hollow as he tells Quentin how the Source had improved on his own plan to infiltrate the lives of the Charmed Ones, how he tormented and discredited youngest, newfound sister Paige, who suspected something. How Phoebe had turned evil to be with the person she thought was still her husband. How, turning back, she’d vanquished him.

Quentin would like to say he doesn’t know how Phoebe Halliwell could have done that, but he remembers -  _ “Quentin says go free,” _ and the cacodemon attacking newly-Niffin Alice, remembers bracing to banish the Monster when he’d thought Eliot was dead and only his body remained. Then he can only feel horror and sympathy for all of them. That lasts through the rest of Cole’s story, how he’d come back from the Wasteland by absorbing demonic power. So much power it had eventually turned his blood to acid, driven him mad - and loss had done that too, because Phoebe wouldn’t take him back, had never realized he was possessed, not evil. 

“By the end, of course, I was evil again. What point was there in being good if Phoebe didn’t want anything to do with me?” Cole says, as he tells of creating an alternate timeline where Phoebe’s sister Paige died, but the Paige of his world accidentally followed, and he had been killed for good, there. “And now I’m too evil for heaven, too good for hell,” he finishes with a bitter laugh. 

What can Quentin do in response but tell his own story? From Brakebills to the Seam, he talks, and if he were still alive his voice would have long since gone hoarse, but he isn’t and so it doesn’t. Cole listens, and asks pointed questions like Quentin would expect from a guy who apparently trained as a lawyer. “I should never have gone to the Seam,” he says finally, leaning his head against the banister and reaching for Ariadne. The soft prickle of her fur under his fingertips is familiar, safe. “Alice asked me to, and we’d just fixed our friendship, we were gonna try working as a team.” 

He closes his eyes, because that isn’t the real reason. “But the thing is, I wanted to. I wanted to be the person who banished that thing, for all the people it killed, all the shit it made me help it with and the hell it put me through. More than anything, because it took Eliot, because it stole him and locked him away and I just wanted to be the one who made it pay for that. And then I was gonna go back, and be there when he woke up, but I. I couldn’t run, couldn’t make myself want to. And I don’t know - was it the suicidal thoughts winning completely or was some of it that I’d been passively killing myself for months and I physically wasn’t capable of running anymore? I don’t even know.” 

“Christ, kid,” Cole mutters.

“Tell me about it,” Quentin sighs.

“Still, I can’t help but feel a little jealous of your Eliot.” 

“He’s not  _ my  _ -” Quentin opens his eyes to see Cole giving him a deeply scornful look. “Why are you jealous of him?” 

“Well, it’s a different situation, if I’m being fair - this Monster didn’t pretend to be Eliot, you knew very well it was a possession, while Phoebe and her sisters still think I willingly turned again, when they think about me at all. But still, how far you went to get him back… I believed, once, that she would do that for me. Maybe she would have if she’d known before it was too late, but then again maybe not,” Cole says, mouth twisting as his gaze follows an unaware Phoebe Halliwell across the sunroom. “And don’t try that with me. I walked away from everything I’ve ever known because I fell in love. That you’re in love with him is so obvious I’d see it blind.”

“Does it matter, when I’m dead and he doesn’t want me anyway? Not like that, at least.”  _ Q, you know I love you, but you’re not… _ Quentin tries to push the thoughts away, watches Cole watch Phoebe and thinks that at least he isn’t condemned to something like this. Well, not yet anyway. Who knows what will happen if the Furies catch him? 

But even then, if he’s forced to watch Eliot and never interact with him, watch him maybe be happy with someone one day, someone more suited to him than Quentin, well. He always knew the Monster wasn’t Eliot, he never had to look into the eyes of the love of his life and know it was Eliot behind them, when it hurt him. 

Cole, apparently, has seen the love of his life kill him twice and it  _ was  _ her behind her eyes, and now he carries on existing stuck watching the family he was almost part of. Quentin figures no worst-case scenario can beat that one.

He stays with Cole for what amounts to three more days, and then the floor falls out under him. Quite literally, in fact.

  
  


** _(iv) and I’m on the edge of my breath_ **

“So you’re the new boy.” 

Quentin scrambles to his feet, looking around wildly and realizing he’s in a - a study, maybe, it looks  _ ancient _ . The woman before him is wearing… actually, he has no idea what she’s wearing, it looks maybe like an ancient Greek thing? A chiton, that’s it, he read about that somewhere. Her daemon is a beautiful multicolored bird that he can’t name, but whose feathers manage to catch the odd light in this place despite the fact that, like all dead people’s daemons, he’s translucent. 

“I - yeah. Quentin.” 

“I am Charmian. I train all new Guides, and we’ve chosen you to become one. A seeker, I’ve heard?” 

“I… don’t know what exactly you mean by any of that,” Quentin says cautiously. Charmian’s smile is sharp. 

“A seeker is one who is trying to get back to the land of the living. It’s rare that people turn back as quickly as you do, I’ve been told you didn’t even get on the ferry. Ah, sorry, the train, now, it was a ferry for most people in my day. For me, it was a walk down long corridors, knowing that at the end my heart would be weighed against a feather. Can you blame me for hesitating in the face of that? You’ll adjust, of course. We all do.” 

Quentin shrugs and doesn’t answer, his head still spinning from his fall, Ariadne pressing against his leg. It’s interesting that she looks every bit as insubstantial as the other daemons here, made of colored smoke, but the weight and warmth of her haven’t changed at all. He’s glad of that, it’s the only thing that makes him feel even a little bit real anymore. Of course, in many ways he actually isn’t real, but - best not to think about that for too long. “Does everyone really give up eventually?” Ariadne asks for him when he can’t seem to find the words. 

“Well, no,” Charmian admits. “But success is -” 

“Not entirely impossible,” her daemon says, his voice low and rich, and when Charmian frowns, he preens her hair with his beak. “Charmian, we never start things with a new recruit by lying to them. Boy, your chances are slim to none, but those who have freed themselves start with us. After all, the Guides are your only choice besides moving on, and if you move on, that’s the end of it.”

“But eventually you’ll almost certainly decide an afterlife as a Guide, or moving up the ranks to Reaper or Hunter, is a better use of your eternity than trying to find a way back. Or your loved ones will die, move on properly, and you’ll retire to join them,” Charmian says briskly. 

“Or one of the death gods will decide you’re pretty and take you into their court,” her daemon says, earning himself a pinch on the neck from his human. “You don’t want that - you’ll  _ never  _ leave then, not to move on even, until they tire of you.”

“Somehow I don’t think that will be a problem,” Quentin says slowly. 

“No, Macaria already has one of you, and you aren’t really to the others’ tastes,” Charmian says absently, flicking through papers on her desk now, and either missing or ignoring the startled look on Quentin’s face. After a moment, he decides he’s better off… not thinking about that one. Though there is a possibly useful bit of information in there, which -

“Are my other timeline selves all moved on? Er, except for the one in Macaria’s court?” he asks carefully. 

“All but one, because being put in a hell dimension can’t be considered moved on in the same fashion - oh, don’t look so alarmed,” Charmian says, looking up now. Quentin’s not sure what his face is doing, but clearly it’s enough to get him a little sympathy. “The one in hell is your counterpart that was brought back without his shade.  _ That  _ part of him continues to reside quite happily with other lost shades in the house in the Meadows. He won’t be anyone’s problem unless he should find a way to escape his hell dimension.” 

Oh. That’s not concerning at all. 

After that, Quentin keeps his mouth shut as Charmian explains the role of a Guide. Quentin listens because he suspects he doesn’t have a choice and presumably if he has a job the Furies won’t be allowed to have him. He doesn’t ask, in case somehow this Charmian doesn’t know about the Furies and will turn him over if she finds out. Guides find lost spirits, all over the multiverse. Earthbound ghosts who can’t break through to the other side because they don’t know how - some earthbound spooks are there for punishment, like Cole, though Guides also collect them when that’s done. Ghosts who accidentally ended up in the wrong afterlife dimension, good guys in hellscapes and vice versa. The latter is usually done with a Hunter, for obvious reasons. 

Quentin learns about them, too. Hunters are promoted Guides whose job is to track down hell dimension escapees, demonic-type entities, that sort of thing. Reapers, of course, collect the dead - the trick to being a Reaper, that makes it also a promotion from Guide, is that the dead person never knows the Reaper is there. So it’s a Guide in constant stealth mode, basically. Quentin could, in theory, find the person who Reaped him - who, Charmian notes as an aside, Reaped every version of him in 40 timelines, but he decides not to ask. He doesn’t really want to know.

Charmian finishes her explanation, then looks at him, her blue eyes seeming to go right through him. “Well? Will you join us?” 

“What happens if I don’t?” Quentin asks, cautious.

“Then we let the Furies have you. You cannot simply refuse to cross over and expect nothing to come of it,” she tells him. And, well, when put that way, what can he do but agree?

He’s not sure how long his orientation lasts - like everything else in the afterlife, the time it takes is impossible to determine. But at some point, he no longer has a test to take or something new to read, and he’s just become enough aware of this to stare in bewilderment at his empty hands when someone clears their throat behind him. Quentin turns to find a - well, a boy, really. It feels odd thinking that, a lingering echo of a life never really lived, but this guy is younger than he physically was when he died, by a few years maybe. 

And there’s something vaguely familiar about him, as well. 

“Hi, I’m Chris Halliwell. I’m told you spent some time in my house?” 

“What,” is Quentin’s first response, because what the fuck. Except then he remembers one of Cole’s stories, about a Chris from the future who’d come to save his family and died doing it. Oh. This must be him. Now that Quentin’s thinking about it, he can see echoes of the little boy he saw while visiting Cole in this adult’s green eyes and his dark brown hair, as floppy as Quentin’s own but a little better kept than he usually bothers with. 

The daemon at Chris’ heels is a black-and-silver fox, who sits neatly beside her human when he stops moving. Ariadne approaches the other daemon and they circle, sizing each other up, even as Quentin looks Chris over and gets the same treatment in return. “Nice to meet you, why am I meeting you?” Quentin asks. 

“I’m a Guide. Your new partner,” Chris explains, and offers his hand. Quentin blinks, and takes it, for a quick, firm handshake. 

“Are you supposed to make sure I don’t try to escape?” he asks. 

“No, not unless you try it when we’re on the job,” Chris says with a smile that slowly turns mischievous. “But, truthfully, as long as you warn me first and don’t leave me hanging, you can do whatever you need to do.” 

Quentin considers him for a moment. “I think I’m going to like you, Chris Halliwell.” 

  
  


** _(v) whispered voices at my ear_ **

Quentin does, as it happens, like Chris. For one thing, they’re both time-fucked, albeit in different ways. Quentin remembers a whole lifetime that never happened, while Chris is a time-traveler who literally died on the very day he was born. They both died, in fact, right at the end of the fight when they’d thought it would finally be over and safe. 

Unlike Quentin, Chris did not kill himself. When Quentin tells him the story of how he died, he… sort of glosses over the fact that he didn’t make it out because he stopped running. He can’t quite admit to it, when his new partner survived years in a war zone created by his own brother, only to die from a knife to the gut, stabbed by someone they’d called a friend. 

Chris’ fox daemon is named Tyche and she gets on with Ariadne even better, which is nicely convenient. “I’m pretty sure they’re gossiping about us,” Chris says one day, his eyes on the fox and golden cat lying muzzle to muzzle. 

“Daemons do that,” Quentin says with a faint laugh. 

The thing is, being a Guide is actually - interesting. Collecting souls isn’t a bad job, though it can be depressing. The places he can see are fascinating, and he wonders sometimes if Alice saw any of them as a Niffin, or if Julia saw them when she was a goddess. He wants to tell Eliot everything, describe all the places for him, even try to draw them which is a funny impulse because Quentin hasn’t liked drawing since he was fifteen.

Chris, incidentally, is one of those Guides who was not a seeker. He has no interest in returning to life, and he even keeps his family check-ups to a minimum. “For one thing, Cole’s kind of irritating,” he explains when Quentin asks. “For another, I went back to save them, and Wyatt. And they’re saved. I don’t even know if I could go back or if I’d just… displace the Chris who’s going to grow up to a better future. I can’t do that, and I do good work here. We do good work here.” 

They do, Quentin supposes, thinking of the lost little boy ghost they’d brought over just today, to be given a chance at reincarnation because he died so young. His world was a world of airships - no one can live on the surface of their planet, and Quentin spends some time just soaring among the various aircraft, against the purple sky and pale blue clouds.

If they think he’s having fun exploring, then they won’t notice when - 

He thinks of the Neitherlands and he’s there, he dives through the Earth fountain and comes out in Times Square. He has a moment to think himself at the apartment, has just a flash of - Eliot, still in black, Alice with him, books spread everywhere with 23 coming their way and - 

_ Yank. _

“Guides are not permitted to contact anyone from when they were alive,” Charmian tells him when he lands in a sprawl on the floor of her office, and her blue eyes are hard. “You’re barred from Earth and Fillory, and the Fillorian afterlife as well.”

If that’s supposed to make him less determined, it does the exact opposite.

Quentin’s room in Guide quarters fills with papers and books, as the time he can’t keep track of passes. Chris laughs at him on a regular basis, because Quentin does nothing but work and study. Doesn’t eat, doesn’t sleep, because there’s no point, they don’t need those things to function and he hasn’t got time to do them for fun. And it’s been - he doesn’t know how long, he tried to keep tally marks on his wall for each job, but they kept vanishing until he gave up. It’s been so many jobs, so many hours of studying, of hunting up other spellcaster ghosts for tips and magic… 

It’s been years, or so Quentin and Ariadne think, and they can’t find anything. Quentin’s tried a dozen different things, and none of them work. He thinks he breaks through to Earth once, a spinning flash of a sunlit bedroom, three people in the bed and a fourth sitting at the foot, which, OK, on the list of things opposite from helpful that ranks pretty high. 

He thinks he breaks through again, and sees them all scattered around the sitting room in the Cottage, hears the word “Blackspire”. And another time, when he can’t even manage to find the right people much less the right time, he’s pretty sure that was fucking  _ Tudor England _ he caught a glimpse of. Time and death are linked, he read that somewhere, which might explain the new ways in which he is time-fucked, but it doesn’t help him fix it. The upshot is, none of this is in any way helpful. 

And no one has come for them. 

“Maybe we should stop,” Quentin says, sorting the books again. By size order this time, because why not. “If they were trying, they must have given up by now.” He looks down at his hands, at the copper wedding bands on each ring finger. He doesn’t know when they manifested, just like he can’t quite remember when his hair got longer again. Something about your internal view of the self, Charmian says. Eventually, you shift from your death body to one that best reflects how you see yourself. 

Quentin’s _ internal view of the self _ is still the age he was when he died, maybe because he’d been so damn aware of having returned to that age, but his clothes, the length of his hair, and the rings on his fingers all belong to life at the Mosaic. He doesn’t know what to do with that, when everyone he once loved is either dead themselves - but as part of his punishment he’s not permitted in the part of the afterlife where Fillorians go, and he hasn’t found his father - or they mourned him and moved forward without him. 

Maybe that’s what he should do. Move forward. 

But he thinks of Cole, left in limbo to watch the woman he gave up everything for, went mad over in the end. He thinks about the horror in Alice’s eyes, the last thing his living eyes ever saw. And he thinks of Eliot curled into himself at the bonfire, always of Eliot, thinks that even manifesting as a ghost Eliot could see, could say something to, would be a start. If he could tell Eliot he’s still fighting maybe he would forgive Quentin for dying, he would help him? Damn it all, can’t he even have that much? 

“We can’t stop. It’s been done. Cole and Bellona did it, from the Wasteland where demon ghosts go,” Ariadne says, as she has done many times. 

“We’re not a half-demon who can absorb a fuckton of power to go back,” Quentin points out, the familiar next line in this old debate. “And I don’t think trying to go to the Wasteland to see if we can absorb demon powers is a good idea. Wrong dimension, wrong magic, and if we can get back that way but can’t get rid of it fast enough, we’ll go batshit crazy.”

“I’m pretty sure we already have magic we’re not supposed to have, Quentin.” 

“We’ve learned spells we wouldn’t be able to use in life, I don’t think that’s the same thing.” 

Actually, though, Quentin isn’t sure if it’s the same thing or not. Chris is a witch - well, a witchlighter - and Quentin is a magician; they’ve been swapping spells since they started working together, and that’s saying nothing of Quentin’s contacts, who number magic handlers from all kinds of places. All magic is the same in the afterlife - that tidbit he has from Jacquetta, who is one of his favorite contacts and a ghost old enough to know what she’s talking about, though far younger than, say, Charmian or her niece Selene, who is a Hunter and occasionally pops up in Guide areas. Jacquetta claims her family is descended from a water goddess named Melusina, which, Quentin’s not sure he buys that but he’s definitely heard stranger things.

“Here, you can access any kind of magic you like, provided you learn the right methods,” Jacquetta told him the very first time he met her. Then she’d taught him how, in the living world, she’d read the future not with cards, but with charms tied on strings, dangled in the river. You leave them, then you pick one, you cut the others, and day by day reel in the one you picked. 

There’s a creek, and a foot bridge, where the Guides live. Officially Guides answer to Thanatos but he has next to no say here, it’s Charmian who runs things. So Quentin has always suspected that their district looks like the courtyards of the long-vanished palace in ancient Alexandria. After all, Charmian died in Alexandria, at the side of her queen. So that’s his theory, though he’s never asked. Anyway, the little bridge over the creek isn’t a popular spot, no one bothered his threads. And now there’s just one, and it’s almost time to reel it in. Because he and Ariadne have this argument all the time, involving outside forces can’t hurt, can it?

Under the light of the full moon, Jacquetta said, except the light never changes here. Diffuse and strange, and things aren’t washed in grey like in the Underworld Library but they are off-kilter, none of the colors are quite right. Quentin sometimes can’t remember the real color of his skin, his hair, Ariadne’s fur.

(But he remembers the gold-hazel of Eliot’s eyes, the way one curl would fall loose and dark over his forehead, the black against tawny of Cythera’s fur. All he has to do is close his eyes and they’re so vivid, forever.)

He thinks of the charms as he walks to the bridge. A little headstone, to stay here and accept that he’s dead now and to be happy as a Guide. A sword, to not only accept his life but look at maybe pushing to become a Hunter or a Reaper, harder jobs that they’ll only give him if he proves he’s adjusted. And a plum, to keep fighting, to keep trying. 

“You’ve stacked the odds for giving up and I don’t like that,” Ariadne says, as she’s said before. As ever, Quentin ignores her, because he knows what he’s done. But he’s tried so many damned things and none of them work. None of them even broke through enough to talk to anyone. Maybe it means something.

For a moment, there’s a whisper on the still air.  _ “I call you to me,” _ Quentin hears, and shivers, though he’s incapable of feeling a chill. There’s magic around him, and not all of it is the magic he’s summoned, some of it is too - active for that. Magic from the living world, here? But who, and why?

He reels the thread in and stares at the tiny copper charm of a plum. Closes his fingers around it and pulls, breaking the thread.  _ Don’t give up yet, sweetheart, _ he can hear, like Eliot whispering in his ear. 

_ But you haven’t come for me, I’m trying, El, but I don’t know if I can do it from here.  _

_ Who says I’m not coming for you? Just because I haven’t figured it out yet either doesn’t mean I’m not going to. _

“Do you think they’re still looking?” he asks Ariadne, voice hoarse. He almost wants a drink. 

“I think we’d look forever, and we have to hope - that we’d get the same effort we’d give,” Ariadne says, and Quentin sinks down right there, his daemon climbing in his lap where he can hold her close, the little plum charm clattering on the bridge as it slips from his fingers. 

“I want to go home,” Quentin whispers, and his tears soak Ariadne’s fur like they have countless times before, in the afterlife and as Brian, at the Mosaic and the main lifetime he remembers, like they probably did in thirty-nine timeloops he  _ can’t  _ remember. He wants to go home, oh God. He wants to have Julia’s head on his shoulder while they watch stupid movies, Margo’s laughter in his ears, wants to figure out with Alice what being friends with each other means. He wants the Cythera-Talaus-Ariadne kitty pile, he’ll even take 23’s grumpy face and the way Kady seems half ready to knock all their heads together at any given moment. 

And Eliot,  _ oh God _ , he wants Eliot. Not even - it doesn’t matter anymore, it doesn’t matter if Eliot loves him but isn’t in love with him the way Quentin is with Eliot, it doesn’t matter because Quentin knows he can still curl into Eliot’s side, his arm tight around him, could stay there for hours if he needed. Knows he can tell Eliot anything, can sit there and ramble at him, and it’s all right, it’s even welcome, knows that Ariadne fits perfectly tucked into Cythera’s side. 

He hasn’t wanted it like this before now. Hasn’t let himself. The world is muted here, feelings are muted. Quentin’s sort of - welcomed that, even as he drives himself toward a way home. He hasn’t let himself  _ feel  _ how much he wants it since he ran out of that closet into Cole’s limbo. And it’s like emotion bottles, for all the time he hasn’t felt it it hits like a tidal wave now.

All he can do is breathe through it, and promise himself that this time, he won’t give up until he  _ does something _ about this. _ “ _

_ I call you by the light of your spirit” _ whispers a voice on the strange breeze that sometimes flows through here, and it feels like magic and it sounds like Eliot. Quentin wants to answer, he just doesn’t know how. But he’ll find out, he swears he will, he’ll make it home.

  
  


** _(vi) who I am from the start, take me home to my heart_ **

Quentin still visits Cole, from time to time. He remembers his last months alive, feeling alone even in a room full of his friends, and so he and Ariadne can’t in good conscience leave Cole and Bellona to be actually alone. Besides, he can’t tell his stories about the worlds he gets to see to the people (person) he really wants to tell, but sharing them with a new friend is a little bit of a comfort. 

One day, though, Cole gives him an incantation. “I stole it, when I was still a bounty hunter. Meant to trade it to the Necromancer in exchange for a favor, but he got himself vanquished by a Halliwell. Phoebe’s grandmother, specifically. Anyway, it’s supposed to make a ghost visible to anyone; might do you some good.” 

Technically, Quentin is barred from Earth - at least in the present. The thing about the Underworld that he’s learned is that it exists outside of time, which is why he and Chris have been sent to Earth. But, very carefully, never to a time period where Quentin would encounter someone he knows. Still, if he can project himself somewhere in the past, maybe he can leave a message? 

It’s worth a try, anyway. 

“So why not tell us sooner?” Ariadne asks before Quentin can. Bellona’s ears twitch. 

“We couldn’t remember all of it. We wanted to reconstruct it first.”

“OK, that’s a good reason,” Ariadne admits, and Cole laughs. 

“We thought so,” he says, handing Quentin a slip of folded paper. One convenient thing about being dead; you only have to think about needing things like paper or pen and you suddenly have them. Quentin pockets the spell and heads back to his room. 

It’s in Latin, and there’s directions for a circle to be drawn, candles lit around it. Quentin conjures up what he needs and stands in the circle, Ariadne pressed tight to his legs as they both chant the words. Once, and nothing. Again, and still nothing. “Third time lucky?” Quentin asks, looking down into his daemon’s face and seeing his own frustration mirrored there. 

They try one last time - and the floor falls out from under them. 

Quentin scrambles back to his feet, realizing abruptly that he’s been transported into… an office? Again? What the hell? Then he sees the woman behind the desk and knows even without thinking about it who she is. He bows, as much to hide his confusion as to show his respect. “Lady Macaria, what can I do for you?” 

The second Queen of the Underworld leans back in her chair - almost a regular desk chair, yet something about it makes Quentin think of a throne. “Don’t look so concerned. I have your counterpart from Timeline… 26, I believe it is, for any major requests. You, I just want to talk to. Have a seat.” 

He’s been trying very hard not to think about the counterpart of his who’s one of Macaria’s court ever since Charmian mentioned that whole thing, but he does as he’s told. He sits down with Ariadne at his feet, sitting normally for once just like he did with Penny in a different office when all of this started. He thinks of that mug of hot chocolate that he didn’t drink, and wonders if that meant anything or not.

Macaria studies him for a long moment, long enough that Quentin has to fight the urge to fidget. Ariadne does it for him, kneading her paws against the floor, tail lashing gently. Macaria, like most gods who were born and not made, according to what Quentin’s heard, doesn’t have a proper daemon. But there is a bird perched in the corner who looks kind of like a phoenix because he’s made of purple flame. “I’ve been watching you continue to try to break out, and I decided it was time I stepped in. This is the 40th time I’ve had you in front of me, you know.” 

“Um, no, I didn’t know that,” Quentin says, rubbing his palms against his thighs.

“Oh yes. Before I inherited my mother’s throne, I was the goddess of blessed death. Under many civilizations, one such death that could be considered blessed was falling in battle, and one way or another you always do. This time wasn’t the first where you fell in part because you gave up on some level, but even there… Some cultures did value certain kinds of suicide, and one that saves others is among those.” 

It’s the first time anyone has directly called Quentin’s death a suicide. He knows it was, but Penny hadn’t answered him, only asked what he thought and then tried to convince him that no, it was a sacrifice. As if it couldn’t be both. And no one among the ghosts he calls friends has really brought the issue up, assuming they even know. Well, Cole does, but they’ve kind of talked around that. “So, you summon me every single time? Why, my lady?” 

“These timeloops of yours are rare. I’m not the only one to take an interest in one of you - but it is none of your concern which of your friends has caught the eye of others among us. You know that your friend Julia had the attention of my mother, but you do not need to know more than that.” Macaria tilts her head. “But you lasted longer than the others. I never properly heard the story of your 23rd self - he was pulled away from my very office, a smaller one than this, and I was left with a very puzzled little boy of a shade. Poor thing. Still, there is more story to you. And there is one of you I never met, the old man who died on the Mosaic - and you have his memories. There is a great deal more story to you.”

Quentin blinks. “You… want my life story?” 

“Do you have an objection, Quentin Coldwater?” Macaria’s flash the same purple fire as her ‘daemon’, and well, Quentin doesn’t actually have any objections anyway. He’s just confused. So, he tells her. Everything from Brakebills on, because that’s where his story starts diverging, apparently. He seems to see flashes of moments as he talks, and it’s all he can do to curl his fingers into fists tight enough that his hands would ache if he could still feel pain, and not cry. 

(Why crying, of all functions, is still possible here, when everything else is strictly voluntary, he doesn’t understand.)

“Did you know,” Macaria asks when he’s through, her voice oddly gentle, “that your timeline has split in three?” 

“I - what?” Quentin blinks away the tears he managed not to let fall, for fucking once, confused and wanting to see her face more clearly. “I don’t understand what you mean.” 

“You may have noticed that time is… incalculable here. There is a reason for that. Death and Time are interconnected, you see. Because of this, those of us who are death deities have some sense of time, and your timeline has split - as timelines do, when people meddle inadvertently. Your trip to the past would have created a paradox, had a different series of events not branched off of it. And choices made before the Seam, a rip in time itself, affect the timeline, especially when it had not yet had time to heal fully from the previous ruptures you caused. You stopped partway across the room. Another you did not run immediately, but in the end ran a bit further, enough to be helped, and saved. And then there’s you, specifically.” 

“And I’m dead. Is this you telling me to cease and desist my come back to life plans once and for all?” Quentin asks. 

“No. This is me telling you that you have an option, still. Most people in your position would have two, but I’m afraid only my father can grant one of them, and he will not.” Quentin’s face must do something puzzled because Macaria explains, “The myth of Orpheus. It’s true, but the only way a person is allowed to seek their love in the afterlife is by permission of my father. My mother could usually persuade him, and in some cases I could as well, but - not for you. Not when you were part of the events that killed my mother, and so was the person who would come for you, though it was even less his choice than yours.” 

_ His  _ choice… But... “I - are you saying -” He thinks of Eliot, doesn’t want to dare hope but there’s no one else she could mean, and...

“You would have burned the world to save him, and you don’t know he would do the same to get you back, that he would tear this world apart to find you here and bring you home?” Macaria says, somehow both amused and sad. “Well. My father won’t allow him, so it is up to you. There is an ocean here, we call it the Border Sea. A ghost may jump into it and return to life, if they reach the bottom. But I warn you. It will burn you, and if it burns you too much, if your heart is too heavy with darkness, you won’t last. And if you don’t last, there will be nothing left of you.” 

“Darkness? What, like, unhappy thoughts?” If that’s the case, then he’s fucked.

“No. Being unhappy is not darkness. Darkness is cruelty and all the lesser unkindnesses. Are you strong enough to pay for those and survive it, Quentin? To truly live again?”

Quentin looks down at Ariadne, whose head is tipped up to meet his gaze. It’s a hell of a risk. Getting back, or nonexistence. He doesn’t look away from his daemon’s eyes when he says, “And you guarantee, if I succeed, then I get to go back to life, no strings attached?” 

“There are always strings. You killed yourself - the only reason you get this chance at all, after that, is because you didn’t really  _ choose  _ that in any deliberate way. Your mind turned against you, and that meant your free will was impaired. But it does mean… You will have a journey ahead of you to get home, Quentin. But you can get home from where you will wake, that much I promise on the river Styx.” 

A promise on the Styx is binding, Quentin knows that much. It’s probably the best deal that he is going to get. “OK, then - how do I get there?” he asks, because he’s never heard of the Border Sea before. 

“Just leave, the door will take you where you need to go,” Macaria says, waving at her office door. Quentin swallows hard, rubbing his palms against his thighs again before getting to his feet and walking to the door with Ariadne at his heels.

“Thank you, my lady,” he says. As he turns the knob and walks through, he remembers hugging Penny before walking through the arch, wonders if this all would have been easier if he’d insisted on staying in the Meadows to wait for the others. 

Maybe. But it doesn’t matter now. 

He’s standing on a cliff overlooking a white sand beach and an ocean that… “Holy shit, Ari,” Quentin says. “It’s - it’s like the sky as water.” Black waves lit with white lights like stars, the sky a smoky grey. He thinks of woodsmoke curling up toward a night sky in Fillory, then, that night on the Mosaic when - 

He picks up Ariadne, because he doesn’t want to lose her, holds her tight to his chest. He closes his eyes and thinks of lying under the map table with Julia, as children and as adults trying to find their way back to each other, Asterion and Ariadne chasing each other in circles when they were little. He thinks of Alice as he’d first known her and when he’d fixed the mug at South, the shared smiles that made him hope they might still be friends. Perdix and Ariadne laughing at them, when things were simpler. He thinks of Talaus pulling Ariadne in to cuddle, thinks of Margo sitting with him on the Cottage steps or on his bed, the way she used to tease him with sly fondness. He thinks even of Kady and 23, because they aren’t close but he still cares, he can’t help himself.

Quentin runs and jumps off the cliff with his daemon held tight in his arms, and he thinks of Eliot’s face in the moment after he kissed him on the Mosaic, gold-hazel eyes by firelight, of Eliot stretched out like a cat on the Brakebills sign, hugging him in Whitespire and cracking jokes to hide the unhappiness in his eyes, the way he’d looked when Quentin declared he’d stay in Blackspire and his icy composure when he shot the Monster. Quentin remembers that moment in the park when Eliot had looked at him like he was drinking in the sight of him, and all Quentin could do was stare back.  _ That won’t be our last moment, not now _ , he thinks wildly as he hits the water.

It’s like dying all over again, the water burning him like the sparks once did. Quentin opens his mouth to scream and black water floods in, fills his lungs. He can feel Ariadne spasming against him as he chokes on it -

_ Stolen hands wrapped round his throat - _

No, no. He tries to think of other things. Except that all he can see are all the things he’s done wrong over the years. Depression leaving him a lump in the bed, his suicide plans, being institutionalized. Breaking things. Leaving Julia to the hedges, betraying Alice and then compounding that by lashing out at Eliot and Margo. His dad died because of him, died alone, so many people died because he helped the Monster, who knows who was hurt because he caused magic to go away? 

Useless as a king - why did he even have a crown, he never bothered with it - and useless as a friend, couldn’t be there when Eliot woke up and he made Alice watch him die, Julia got possessed because, again, he played nice with the Monster. Not worth loving either, taking Alice’s choices away and asking Eliot for another go when clearly his choices were taken too.

The water is eating him into nothing and that’s exactly what he deserves - 

Ariadne’s claws sink into his chest and he feels that, opens his eyes to stinging blackness but he opens them, he holds on tighter and lets himself sink. But he isn’t fading, he’s not. He swore he’d find a way back, a way to the people he loves. He’ll make all the amends they might ask for if he can just go back to them. And this is the way, this is the only way so -

His feet touch the bottom, and something catches him round the ankles and  _ pulls _ -

Quentin’s eyes fly open and he chokes on his own breath - oh God, he’s breathing - as he sits upright, his head spinning madly, desperately. He thinks he recognizes the loft from what little his eyes will focus on, but… Was it all a dream? Macaria said it wouldn’t be easy, this can’t be so easy - 

“OK, what the fuck was that?” Quentin blinks, tries to focus - finds himself staring at a narrow-eyed Margo, Talaus growling at her side. “I just saw another you dive into your body, what the fuck is going on?” 

“He’s thinking in stereo,” comes another voice. 23. “Like there’s two Coldwaters in there, and the one in the driver’s seat is definitely not ours.” 

“Um,” he says as his vision clears and he finds himself staring down multiple people who are supposed to be his friends but look ready to hex him into oblivion, “I can honestly say I don’t know how this happened any more than you guys do, but I think I’m in the wrong timeline.” 

And, given he can hear what sounds like his own voice cursing him out in the back of his mind for taking over his body, apparently he’s _ possessing himself. _ Somehow, Quentin thinks he shouldn’t even be surprised this has gone pear-shaped. Macaria did say it wouldn’t be easy.

**Author's Note:**

> And now you see why I call this the daemon multiverse!
> 
> Come chat with me at eidetictelekinetic.tumblr.com!


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